Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

by Tom Robbins

The mamba was long, slender, and graceful, and in striking it rose so high it was virtually vertical, as if balanced momentarily on the tip of its tail. It resembled a self-propelled licorice whip from the Marquis de Sade’s candy shoppe, a sleek six-foot bold italic exclamation point meant to emphasize a single message: DIE! DIE! DIE!

shaking his hand was like being forced to grasp the flaccid penis of a hypothermic zombie.

writing can be simultaneously ironic and heartfelt,

as W. Somerset Maugham once put it, “Realism too often produces novels that are drab and dull,” going on to assert that the fiction that really matters is make-believe, dealing not in truths per se but in effects.

“all matter is condensed energy, we are all one consciousness, there’s no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we’re the imagination of ourselves.”